This is how God’s kingdom comes

Sermon for the week of Sexagesima

Isaiah 55:10-13 + Mark 4:26-32

Every time you say the Lord’s Prayer, you make this petition of your Father in heaven: “Thy kingdom come.” What do you mean? What are you really asking for? How do you want it to come? I think some people are thinking, “Father, may Your kingdom come and replace all the evil, violent, deceitful and unjust kingdoms of this world! May Your kingdom come and rescue Your children, the subjects of Your kingdom, who are suffering here below!” In other words, people are asking for God’s kingdom to come visibly, either now, before the end of the world, so that God gets rid of all evil and makes the world a better place—which is a faulty prayer, because that’s not how God’s kingdom comes. Or, people are asking for the Last Day to hurry up and get here, like, “Come, Lord Jesus!” which is a good prayer, but only a small part of what “Thy kingdom come” is supposed to mean.

How does the kingdom of heaven come? Jesus answers that question through the parables He told. Most of them, if you’ve noticed, are about the kingdom of heaven—what it is, what it looks like to live in it, and how it comes. And while the Last Day is often included in those parables, at the end of them, the parables also teach us how God’s kingdom comes now. For example, Sunday’s parable of the sower and the seed showed us how the kingdom of God comes as the Word of God is preached in the world, like seed that’s scattered on different kinds of soil, and how its coming is often thwarted in the hearts of those who don’t really listen to the Word they hear. We heard that parable from Luke’s Gospel on Sunday, but Mark also records it in chapter 4 of his Gospel, followed almost immediately by the two short parables you heard this evening, also talking about the kingdom of God, and also talking about it in terms of seeds and growing plants. Each little parable teaches us a simple truth about the kingdom of God and how it comes. Let’s take a look at them again.

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.

The kingdom of God is where Christ reigns in the heart of men. The seed is still the Word of God. Preachers preach it, non-preachers speak it, and then the work of the preacher or the speaker is essentially done. The seed is sown, and the power of the Word of God does the rest, producing faith, sustaining faith, and changing a person’s life, so that Christ does indeed reign in the hearts of believers. The kingdom of heaven comes by its own power, automatically, inevitably, without our help, without our planning, without our worrying, without our understanding. The power is all in the seed, in the Word of God itself, because the Holy Spirit is at work in the Word. The plant will ripen. The plant will produce its fruit, all by the power of God’s Word. And then, at the Last Day, the kingdom of heaven will be harvested and brought into God’s heavenly barn.

That’s essentially what God said through the prophet Isaiah, whose words you heard earlier: For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, And do not return there, But water the earth, And make it bring forth and bud, That it may give seed to the sower And bread to the eater, So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.

Martin Luther also referred to this, five years or so after he posted the 95 Theses. He wrote, For the Word created heaven and earth and all things; the Word must do this thing, and not we poor sinners. In short, I will preach it, teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philipp and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.

The Word did everything, does everything. So just be content to have it preached among us, and to invite others to come and hear it, and to speak it to the people you know, whenever you have the opportunity. Speak, not just any part of God’s Word, but the parts that center on sin and grace, and on the Lord Jesus Christ, specifically, who died for our sins and rose again, to call all men to repentance and faith, and to give believers the right to become children of God. There’s more to the Word of God than that, but to speak that is to sow the seed, that grows without your help, where and when the Spirit pleases.

That’s the first parable, in a nutshell. The power to grow the kingdom of heaven is in the seed, not the sower, in the Word of God, not the one who speaks it. Now for the second parable: With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.

The Word of God, when it’s proclaimed, looks so tiny, so small, so insignificant, and those who believe it are so few compared with the rest of the world. That was true at the beginning of the New Testament, and it remains true today. Imagine going out into the pagan world, as the apostles did, and preaching this message about a man who is also God, who gave His life on a cross and rose again from the dead to save us from our sins. Imagine telling the world that the little nation of Israel alone, out of all the nations of the earth, had been given the Word of the true God, and that His Word had been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. How could such a message compete with the Roman Empire and and the Greek culture with their well-established religions? But the kingdom of heaven came, all by itself, and grew, and has been growing and spreading throughout the world into something enormous, something that has lasted 2,000 years, and that will last until the end of the world, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

So don’t worry about how small a certain church appears, or how insignificant a conversation may seem where you plant the Word of God, centered on Christ Jesus. The kingdom of God comes through such little conversations, and through sermons heard only by a few, and maybe uploaded to the internet, where a few more are able to hear. The kingdom of God will continue to grow until it reaches its full height. God will see to it. It will come by itself, by its own power, and will grow into something magnificent. And neither the devil nor his children in the world will be able to stop it.

But Jesus still teaches you to pray for it: Thy kingdom come. So pray. Pray that God will bless the preaching of His Word, and know that He most certainly will. The kingdom of heaven has already come to you who believe. Now may it continue to come, to us, and to others, until the Last Day, when we will see God’s kingdom come in all its glory. Amen.